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Workshop at the Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics (COLING-ACL 2006)

Sydney, Australia

-Submission Deadline: April 7, 2006-

Sentiment and subjectivity in text constitute a problem that is orthogonal to typical topic detection tasks in text classification. Despite the lack of a precise definition of sentiment or subjectivity, headway has been made in matching human judgments by automatic means. Such systems can prove useful in a variety of contexts. In many applications it is important to distinguish what an author is talking about from his or her subjective stance towards the topic. If the writing is highly subjective, as for example in an editorial text or comment, the text should be treated differently than if it were a mostly objective presentation of facts, as for example in a newswire. Information extraction, summarization, and question answering can benefit from an accurate separation of subjective content from objective content. Furthermore, the particular sentiment expressed by an author towards a topic is important for ''opinion mining'', i.e. the extraction of prevalent opinions about topics or items from a collection of texts. Similarly, in business intelligence it is important to automatically extract positive and negative perceptions about features of a product or service.

Over the past several years, there has been an increasing number of publications focused on the detection and classification of sentiment and subjectivity in text.

The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers to share recent work in this area.

The CSLP-06 workshop addresses the question of the role of constraints in the representation and the implementation of language processing. The workshop topic is intended to be interpreted inclusively: contributions from linguistics, computer science, psycholinguistics, and related areas are welcome, and an interdisciplinary perspective is of particular interest.

Motivation

Constraints are widely used in linguistics, computer science, and psychology. How they are used, however, varies widely according to the research domain: knowledge representation, cognitive modelling, problem solving mechanisms, etc. These different perspectives are complementary, each one adding a piece to the puzzle. For example, linguistics proposes in-depth descriptions implementing constraints in order to filter out structures by means of description languages, constraint ranking, etc. The constraint programming paradigm, on the other hand, shows that constraints have to be taken as a systematic whole and can thus play a role in building the structures (or can even replace structures). Finally, psycholinguistics experiment the role of constraint systems for cognitive processes in comprehension and production as well as addressing how they can be acquired.

The purpose of this workshop is to address the question of constraints and language processing, taking these different points of view into consideration. The idea is to see whether a paradigm can be found, unifying the different perspectives into a common framework capable of explaining how constraints play a role in representing, processing and acquiring linguistic information, and this from a formal, technical, and cognitive perspective.

In this workshop, we particularly encourage an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together people from different domains and their intersections. Submissions from linguistics, computer science, and psychology, as well as their intersections (such as natural language processing and psycholinguistics) are encouraged. Submissions will address the general topic ''Constraints and Language Processing'' and may focus on sub-topics such as:

The CSLP-06 workshop is a part of COLING-ACL; it will be held in Sydney after the main conference.

Submission

Submissions are expected to be full papers, following the COLING-ACL'06 guidelines. Maximum size is eight (8) pages, including references. Submission must be submitted in electronic format; the only accepted format is PDF.

The papers must be submitted no later than April 21, 2006. Papers received after that date will not be reviewed. For details of the submission procedure, please consult the submission webpage reachable via the conference website.